If Forever Comes (4 page)

Maybe I was a fool to think that after
everything I’d done, I could somehow deserve what Elizabeth had
promised.

Because now I knew better.

Seven-point-three miles was a greater distance
than I could ever fathom.

God.

Remorse shook me as I glanced in the mirror
and changed lanes. We’d come so close to making it. Only one day
and Elizabeth would have been my wife. Then one brutal lash of fate
had cut us deep. Shattered us in a way that neither of us could
have anticipated. That wound had festered. Rotted and decayed.
Built and burned until it’d erupted. Elizabeth had cut me from her
life just as harshly as the trauma had struck her down.

But it wasn’t as if I weren’t broken,
too.

I crossed those impenetrable miles. Steadily
my heart began to pound harder and faster with each second that
passed by. Not with the stirring of hope as it’d done all those
months when I’d first returned, when I’d done everything I could to
make amends for the greatest mistake I’d ever made. Definitely not
like it’d done with the overpowering thrill of excitement I’d had
when I traveled here after the modest house had become my
home.

Now it thudded with the deepest resonance of
pain.

On a heavy sigh, I made a left into the quiet
neighborhood. I pulled into Elizabeth’s driveway, killed the
engine, and forced myself to climb out. A cloak of early morning
fog sat like an oppressive weight in the gray sky, blanketing me in
a heaviness I couldn’t escape, even if the sun were to somehow
manage to shine. In disinclination, I stuffed my hands in my pants
pockets and plodded up her sidewalk to the front door. Drawing in a
deep breath, I rapt twice on the door, then turned to study the
loose threads of the tattered and worn
welcome
rug placed
strategically in front of Elizabeth’s door.

Welcome.

Right
.

Nerves wound me tight, a vise constricting the
base of my throat. I fought to put up those walls of protection,
desperate to guard my heart against what I would find
inside.

For three months it’d been like this. But
there was no getting used to it. I mean, God, I hadn’t gotten over
Elizabeth in those six years I’d been away. There had been
absolutely nothing I could do to cover up the love I had for her,
no desires or goals or bodies dense enough to bury the need that
had consumed me since the first time I’d glimpsed her. She’d stolen
something from me that I’d never gotten back, something she kept
hidden deep beneath the surface in places I doubted either of us
could see, in places neither of us could define.

Did I really think I’d be able to strip her
from my spirit now?

Metal scraped as the deadbolt was set free.
The door slowly swung open to reveal Elizabeth standing
there.

Unable to stop myself, my eyes sought out the
one
. The one who owned me, heart and soul. Looking at her
crushed me anew. It was a punch straight to the gut, hard enough to
knock the air from my lungs.

No. There wasn’t a chance in hell I would ever
stop loving this woman.

She was thin. Too thin, her cheeks sunken and
her arms frail, her skin ashen and pale. But it was the warmth that
had been snubbed from her eyes that absolutely killed
me.

Broken.

There was no other way to describe
her.

Every part of me ached to step across the
threshold, to take her in my arms and promise her that I would
somehow help her heal, that in time, it really would be okay, and
that one day, it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

But I had no fucking idea how to gather the
scattered pieces, no clue how to put her back together.

For a fleeting moment, my eyes locked with
hers, and I thought maybe I glimpsed it, a transient flicker of her
own longing, like maybe she was wishing I was strong enough to save
her, too.

In clear discomfort, Elizabeth dropped her
gaze and fidgeted as she looked to the floor. “Lizzie, honey.” Her
voice was weak. “Your daddy is here.”

“Coming!” Lizzie called back from upstairs.
The muted echoes of my child’s movements in her room above filtered
down to where I waited for her in the entryway below.

I shifted in the unease, attempting to study
Elizabeth from where I pretended my focus was on my shoes. Gauging
her, I tried to get some sense of whether she was really
okay.

What a ridiculous notion.
Okay
. What
did that even mean? Because okay in itself seemed impossible.
Unattainable. She was most definitely not okay.

Fuck
.

And neither was I. Not even close.

I knew she could feel me, the severity of my
hidden stare, even when I was doing my best to conceal it beneath
the suffocating tension that ricocheted between us every single
time we were in the other’s presence. She tucked her chin deeper as
if she could deflect my concern, curled and clenched her
hands.

God, seeing her engagement ring on her left
hand killed me.

I wanted to shake her. To beg her to snap out
of it.

To plead with her to open her eyes and
see
. To remember exactly why she’d allowed me to place that
ring there in the first place. I wanted to demand to know why she
didn’t take it off.

But me pushing her was exactly what had cast
the fatal stone, what had driven the last nail into splintering
wood. The fracture between us was so profound, the pressure so
intense, there was nothing we could do to stop the break. A
separation of hearts when they just wouldn’t hold.

My gaze jerked upward when I heard footsteps
above. Lizzie ran out of her room. She bounded downstairs, her inky
black hair set free. Soft wisps and bangs framed that precious
face. Her backpack bounced on her shoulders with each urgent
step.

The pain in my heart ebbed. Just a fraction.
But it was there.

This little girl was my light.

She smiled when she hit the last stair and
hopped down into the foyer.

“Morning, Daddy.” She smiled through her
haste.

“Good morning, princess. How’s my baby girl
this morning?”

“I’m good, Daddy. I’m all ready for school and
my backpack is all full, too,” she said with a distinct sense of
pride and a resolute nod of her head.

“How about your lunch, sweetheart?” Elizabeth
asked.

“I already packed it, Mommy. I’m all ready to
go.”

“Well, I do believe you’re forgetting
something, Lizzie,” I said, forcing myself to find a smile, to
continue to show her how much I loved her.

Lizzie frowned, her little nose scrunched up
in question. “What?”

“My hug, you silly girl.”

A roll of giggles escaped her, and she rushed
in to hug me around the waist. I wrapped my arms around her
shoulders, leaned down to bury my nose in her hair, breathed her
in.

When she started first grade a few weeks ago,
she told me she was
too big
for me to hold her
anymore.

God, did I ever disagree.

All I wanted was to pick her up so I could
feel the weight of my daughter in my arms.

The way she was squeezing me now, I thought
maybe she was feeling the same way, too.

“I missed you so much, Daddy,” she finally
whispered, all the levity from before gone, replaced with the
gravity of our situation.

“I missed you, too, sweetheart. More than you
could ever know.”

She’d matured so much. The child had to have
grown at least three inches over the summer. But where that
maturity was really noticeable was in her expressions. Her
cheekbones were becoming more prominent as the soft roundness of
her chubby cheeks slowly faded away, as that baby face gave way to
a little girl’s.

And her eyes. The vast innocence that had swum
in their depths had been erased in time, wiped out by circumstances
no child should ever have to face.

“I think I’m going to need one of those, too,
Lizzie,” Elizabeth said with a tip of her head. Her smile was as
forced as mine.

When we were with Lizzie, Elizabeth and I did
our best to pretend as if everything was fine. It was the worst
kind of deceit. The child had been affected just as severely as we
had been, even if she hadn’t been able to fully grasp the meaning.
She only knew that the life we’d finally attained had been
destroyed, that for six weeks, there’d been so much torment filling
the walls of this little house, none of us could
breathe.

And then she’d known her daddy had
left
.

Her sixth birthday had come with such joy. We
had a party just as big as the one I first attended the year
before, although this one had been without all the unease and
tension that had tarnished her fifth birthday party. None of that
had existed on her sixth. Our family had been whole.
Complete.

A week later, the security she found within
the walls of that home had been crushed.

There was no doubt all of this had rocked
her.

I glanced at the delicate gold ring she wore
around her finger, the one Elizabeth and I had given her the night
after I’d proposed to Elizabeth.

The commitment we had made to Lizzie was one
we refused to break. No matter what happened between us, Lizzie
would always know she was adored by both her mother and father.
There was no fighting whether Lizzie would still be a part of my
life. It’d come without question.

Now, it was just Elizabeth and I floundering,
trying to figure out how to make all of this work.

Work
.

Agony constricted every cell in my body, as if
the life were being squeezed out of me, a slow asphyxiation. It was
hard to comprehend how much standing here truly hurt. Physically.
Mentally. Emotionally. It was excruciating.

Nothing about this
worked
.

We were barely surviving, just fumbling
through the days.

And all of them were spent missing my
girls.

Lizzie turned and mashed herself to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth ran her fingers through Lizzie’s hair and placed a tender
kiss on the crown of her head.

“I’ll be there to pick you up after school,”
she promised as she stepped back to free Lizzie from her
hold.

“Okay, Mommy.”

I rubbed at the sore spot on my chest, wishing
there was some way to soothe it. Hide it. Cover it. But there was
no relief found in this miserable situation. How could there be?
Because all I wanted were the two girls standing in front of me,
and having only one of them for meager minutes a day did nothing to
fill up the aching void.

Picking Lizzie up every morning for school
took me to my highest high while it simultaneously knocked me to my
lowest low.

Those precious moments with her were the only
thing in this lonely life that I cherished. But leaving her there
at the school entrance, watching her hair swish along her back as
she disappeared through the gate, was the worst kind of reminder of
what I was missing.

Warily, I glanced at Elizabeth. The woman I
loved. The one who wouldn’t even spare me a glance.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “We’d
better get going or you’ll be late for school,” I coaxed as I
brushed my fingers along Lizzie’s shoulder.

She nodded, the sweet smile making a
resurgence. It was as if the child didn’t know how to act, the joy
that lived deep within her, that natural goodness vying to make its
way out while the sorrow that had taken over our lives fought to
keep it down.

“Bye, Mommy,” she called behind her as she
turned and walked away.

I took her hand and led her down the sidewalk.
The door quietly clicked shut behind us.

Lizzie climbed into her spot in the backseat
of my car, tossing her backpack onto the seat beside her before she
buckled herself into her booster.

I situated myself in the driver’s seat, put my
car in reverse, and glanced at my little girl through the rearview
mirror as I backed out of the driveway.

I hadn’t seen her since I’d dropped her back
at her mother’s on Saturday morning after she spent Friday night
with me at my condo. The weekends without Lizzie were the
worst.

“How was your weekend, princess?”

Lizzie shrugged a little and trained her
attention out the window. “Okay, I guess,” she said, her voice low,
woven with despondence.

I put the car in drive and headed toward her
school. Maybe it was completely out of the way, an irrational chore
to travel all this way to drive her a mile to her school every
morning. I didn’t care. I needed this time with her, this
connection that promised I was still an integral part of her
life.

“Just okay?” I prodded, struggling to keep my
voice from cracking. I hated seeing her this way. Her mood
constantly fluctuated, up and down, back and forth, hints of my
sweet baby girl emerging then receding just as quickly.